I went to a Ladies Tea with my mom on Saturday. Her church women’s group puts this on every year, and it really is quite fun. Each table is hosted by one lady, who is responsible for decorating and setting it…and it’s a really good excuse for some of them to pull out all that gorgeous old china that they’ve had stashed in the back of their cupboards for decades. There’s a theme as well – one year it was fashions around the world, where people donated outfits they had from their travels, and were then modeled by volunteers from the group. One year it was a Mad Hatter’s tea party. This year it was a Victorian theme, with a trio of actors from a guild nearby, who came dressed appropriately and talked about Victorian dress, hair styles, and fan etiquette. Yes, I said fan etiquette. According to these people, there was this whole language associated with what a young lady did with her fan. Tapping it on the cheek, fluttering fast or slow, pulling it through her hand – all of that had secret messages. It sounded extremely complicated and I had to wonder just how many of the gentlemen actually understood all the messages that the ladies were sending them via fan-mail, but anyway it was an interesting tidbit of information.

These teas are always fun, and I think one main reason is that it’s a reason for a lot of these ladies to get out and dress up and actually *be* ladies. I don’t mean that they’re not ladies every other day of the year, but this is one of those rare opportunities for them to get all fancied up and wear their best hats and eat cucumber sandwiches and tea cakes from fine bone china and sip tea from cups so delicate you can see through them. It’s not a common thing anymore in normal society to have something quite like this, and the little old ladies all seem to enjoy it so much. The presentations are geared toward woman – there may be a few men involved in the tea, playing the piano or serving the food, but this is something done by the ladies, for the ladies, and it is no place for testosterone.

On a completely unrelated topic, in my brief time as interim manager, I had to change desks. The new desk is in the same big room that we’ve all been stuffed into. This means that, until this morning, I was no longer next to my phone. Oh, I was next to *a* phone, but not mine, and I couldn’t forward the calls to this phone because it went directly to someone else’s voicemail. I should point out here that all the phones in this room have exactly the same ring (and the acoustics in here are horrid, based on the fact that the walls do not go all the way to the ceiling, for example), so when a phone rings on this half of the room, it really is impossible to tell whose it is, and there are a number of us that go leaping for them. The fact that I’ve been sitting in a different desk only makes it worse because this means I’m forever rising from my chair to holler “Is that me?” when a phone rings. The people sitting around my old desk are probably rather happy that today I finally can get my own darn calls. The guy who came to switch my phone seemed very concerned about that fact that I won’t be able to transfer or get my messages without going through a complicated series of number punching until this afternoon. Heh. I don’t care! I can finally get phone calls without having to dash across the room, leaping recycling boxes and random laptop bags in the vain hopes of catching my calls.